EPA critic to NSA: Hey, want to share?

A conservative gadfly who has made a crusade of uncovering embarrassing emails at the Environmental Protection Agency wants to tap a new potential evidence trove: the National Security Agency’s electronic snooping program.

Attorney Chris Horner has filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the NSA to turn over any information it might have gleaned from former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s personal Verizon email account. The data could buttress critics’ accusations that Jackson and other top environmental regulators have routinely used private channels to discuss public business.

“When NSA made the decision to obtain information on Verizon customers not due to any particular suspicion or as part of any law enforcement action, it determined that any privacy concerns were outweighed by the public’s interest in NSA possessing such records,” Horner said in his letter to the spy agency.

In addition, Horner cited a Verizon Web page in which the company said it’s allowed to share private information in certain circumstances under the contracts that customers have signed. “We also note that Verizon asserts Ms. Jackson would have agreed to such sharing as part of the privacy clause in her customer agreement,” he wrote.

Jackson, who is now the top environmental officer at Apple, didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment. The EPA and the NSA did not comment either. Horner filed the request on behalf of the American Tradition Institute and the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic.

Horner’s transparency crusade has already created some uncomfortable moments for the EPA, most notably by revealing the existence of a secondary EPA email account in which Jackson used the name “Richard Windsor.” Top Republican lawmakers have seized on Horner’s results to back up their own accusations that EPA leaders systematically bypass FOIA’s requirements by using unpublicized or private email accounts to discuss policy with political friends and environmentalists.

One EPA regional administrator resigned earlier this year while Senate Republicans were in the midst of uncovering the fact that he had discussed his EPA work with environmentalists and others using his personal email account. The agency’s inspector general is investigating the agency’s email practices.

Horner also recently unearthed an email in which Jackson asked a Siemens vice president to use her home email address when contacting her directly. That revelation came just before a federal district court judge ruled last week that another conservative group — the Landmark Legal Foundation — can use a lawsuit to demand evidence on whether senior agency officials “may have purposefully attempted to skirt disclosure under the FOIA.”

But since Jackson left the agency in February, there may be little chance for litigation with the EPA to lead to a search of Jackson’s personal email. And that’s where Horner is hoping NSA can help out.

Horner wants the agency to provide “all metadata (duration and time of the communication, sender and recipient, etc.) from Verizon voice and/or data accounts in NSA’s possession for the phone/PDA/text/instant message and/or email account(s) held by Lisa P. Jackson,” according to the request.

But Horner might not have much luck, the liberal website ThinkProgress said in a posting Monday, noting that the NSA recently rejected a ProPublica reporter’s request for any data the agency has on himself. “Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries’ compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” the NSA told reporter Jeff Larson.